I’m in an eternal struggle with clutter in my apartment. Its not that my pad is dirty (I stay up on my dishes, bathroom and sheets), it’s just that it tends to stay cluttered. I wish I was a neat freak (like most people in my profession), but I’m just not. There are piles of mail and boxes and junk and newspapers and books and medical journals and clean, unfolded laundry strewn about in random places on any given day. At some point every two weeks or so, I’ll flip a switch and go on a cleaning frenzy for a few hours and for about a day my apartment will be clutter free (or more likely all but one room will be clutter free and that last room (usually the computer room) will have lots and lots of crap). But over the next day or so, the clutter returns to all parts of the house, and the cycle begins anew. The sheer persistence of this problem is beginning to wear on me.

In the same vane, I’m always losing my eternal struggle to get up on time. It seems that I’m uniformly late to my first task of the day; I think this happens because it seems that each night before bed I pause and say to myself, “HEY! Tomorrow is the day. The day that I break my lifelong cycle of slow rising and ensure I get up, out of bed, a mere 5 minutes after my alarm goes off. I’ll be in the shower shortly thereafter, I’ll make a lunch – hell I’ll get to work with TIME TO SPARE!” This happens every damn night – I’m not kidding. But, inevitably, the alarm goes off, I slap snooze about 50 times, get up late, take too long to shower, never pack a lunch, end up buying coffee at the drive through, scream at some grandma on the road for not going 65 in a school zone like I want, and then get to work late. Does anyone else have this problem?

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day. I met up with George and his girlfriend and Gwen and Michele for drinks and food at some place called Katie Downs on the Tacoma waterfront. It was fun but I was tired. The highlight was some ancient dude in a kilt intermittently playing the bagpipes. He could barely walk and when he played his face got all red and he looked extremely fatigued and we all thought he looked as if he was about to have a heart attack or stroke at any time. George and I kept looking at the guy warily and then looking at each other and arguing our case to be the guy NOT to have to due the upcoming CPR. “Dude, that shit is ALL YOU.”

Speaking of George, his girlfriend Marty is in town. She lives in Denver and they have been dating for about a year now. (She was in Cabo with us for about half the trip back in the fall). She’s staying out here for 2 weeks so that they can do a “trial of life” sort of thing to see if their long distance relationship is a go or not because soon they will have to make some serious decisions. Talk about a high stress relationship trial. They’ve only ever dated as a long distance couple and George, being in the Army, has limited relationship options basically to include a choice between ‘Marty follows George’ or ‘nothing’, which kind of sucks for both of them. So they’re having at it these 2 weeks trying to see what the official deal may be. Glad I’m not in that situation, but good luck to ‘em. Yikes.